Catholics in China Facing
Crackdown, Return to the Underground

by Patrick E. Tyler

YUJIA, China -- It was the day before
Easter 1995, and they came on bicycle, horse cart and on foot, thousands of
Roman Catholics from the underground Church, and they climbed up into the pine
forest on what is called Yujia Mountain, though it is scarcely a hill. There,
they chased away several troops who had never intruded in their place of
worship before and who insisted that they were conducting training exercises
essential to the national defense.

Then, the
Catholics, more than 10,000 of them, began to pray. They filled the pine forest
here with their song. The leaders set up a platform from which they read out
the Scriptures, and the people danced and reveled in their community all the
way up to the potent spiritual moment of the Easter sunrise.

Today, the
leaders are in jail, charged with interfering with the military training
exercise. Others are on the run. And a visit to this onetime hotbed of
religious fervor is a somber thing.

Over the last two
years, Yujia and dozens of other centers of underground religious activity in
China have been the target of a crackdown by the Communist Party authorities,
who see religion as a vehicle for political organization, dissent or outright
opposition to the party's rule.

The harsh
treatment of Catholics in China dates to the 1950s, when Mao Tse-tung's
Communists expelled the last papal representative and set up the Catholic
Patriotic Association, an official church under Communist control that was more
a tool of persecution than propagation. Driven underground, the unofficial
Roman Catholic Church received a broad mandate from the Vatican to persevere as
best it could by ordaining its own bishops and adapting the liturgy to local
conditions.

When China emerged from the Maoist period, some churches reopened
and religious toleration expanded during the 1980s with Beijing seeking to lure
more religious believers into the government-supervised religious
organizations.

But without a
reconciliation with the Vatican, millions of Catholics remain underground,
where some local governments have tolerated them. Still, they are subject to
periodic assaults ordered by central authorities.

The first clues
that repression hangs as heavy as the winter haze over this remote village in
Jiangxi province, in southern China, are the wall slogans that the police have
painted in recent weeks:

"Catholics are
not allowed to engage in illegal propagation activities."

"Catholics are
not allowed to go to other areas and establish networks."

"Get rid of all
illegal religious gatherings and activities."

To enter this
village as a stranger is to set off alarm bells. The villagers know that
strangers have been sent to live here as spies against their neighbors, and to
report to the Public Security police station a mile away any violation of the
harsh rules that have been laid down.

"The government
is afraid that if we practice our religion, that this will be harmful to
security," Zou Chunxiang, 56, said as her neighbors and a few stray chickens
crowded around her on the dirt floor of her unheated house. "The government is
afraid we will conspire with foreign countries and overthrow the state."

Some of her
neighbors giggle at such a prospect, but Ms. Zou is silent because all of the
men in her family are either in jail or on the run for practicing their
faith.

The
new wave of religious repression in China seems in largest measure the product
of President Jiang Zemin's policy to shore up the "socialist spiritual
civilization" of a population that pays as little attention as it can to
central authority.

Beginning in
1994, Mr. Jiang began to preach to the party faithful that "social stability"
is of paramount importance to the party's survival and therefore must be
preserved at all costs, even if that means slowing the pace of Deng Xiaoping's
economic reforms, re-imposing price controls when they are needed and crushing
political and religious groups whose activities could serve as a vehicle to
challenge the government's legitimacy.

To bend religion
to the interests of the state, Communist Party strategists have devised plans
to ban house churches, arrest religious leaders, register church members and
use military means if necessary to block their unregistered gathering
places.

The
most recent phase of the crackdown began here in November, when the police
started arresting underground organizers to prevent them from holding a
Christmas celebration on this modest mountain, which is at the end of a 20-mile
dirt road from Chongren, the nearest county seat. Up until 1995, Catholics from
all parts of Jiangxi traveled here four times a year to pray.

The Cardinal Kung
Foundation in Stamford, Conn., an advocacy group named for the Chinese prelate
Cardinal Ignatius Kung, whose Chinese name is Gong Pin-Mei and who spent 32
years in prison before his release in 1988, estimates that 80 people were
detained in this area.

A copy of an
action plan to "destroy the organization of the Catholic underground forces"
around Yujia was obtained by local Catholics and smuggled out of China. It was
published by the foundation in February 1997.

Local Catholics
said recently that many of their number were still in detention and that those
released had been forced to pay stiff fines to the police, equal to half a
year's income.

"Every Sunday in
the village, we used to gather in one house to pray, but now we can't even do
that," said the 26-year-old farmer in Yujia. He has built an altar of tile and
brick in his home and adorned it with renderings of the Last Supper, the
Crucifixion and the Ascension.

The great
religious revival that began sweeping China two decades ago is coming under
greater assault as a new generation of Communist Party leaders in Beijing fear
the growth of its moral and spiritual power as the official creed of
Marxism-Leninism declines.

"Nobody believes
in communism as a transcendent, quasi-religious ideology anymore," said Richard
Madsen, a sociologist at the University of California at San Diego who has
completed a study of the underground Catholic Church in China.

"In the past,
many people did believe, and it motivated them to hard work and sometimes great
self-sacrifice that gave a kind of moral legitimacy to the Communist state
because it was a moral project to build the state -- a religious project
ultimately."

Now, he said, there is a "loss of meaning" and a "spiritual vacuum"
for millions of Chinese who are turning to religion.

By some
estimates, more people have joined Christian groups in recent years than have
joined the Communist Party. Today, there are about 53 million party members,
but a February 1996 internal Communist Party document estimated that there were
perhaps 70 million religious believers in China.

When the
Communists took power in 1949, there were only 1 million Protestants in the
country. Today there are an estimated 20 million, though the publicly
acknowledged figure remains at 6.5 million.

Government
statistics say there are four million Catholics in China, but church
organizations and Western academics say 8 million to 10 million is a more
reliable estimate. Whatever the number, it is growing, as is the threat that
Communist Party leaders perceive.

"I think there is
still a paranoia about the role the Church played in Eastern Europe," said
Mickey Spiegel, a research associate at Human Rights Watch in New York,
referring to the support that the Catholic Church gave to the collapse of
communism in Poland and elsewhere.

Last spring,
thousands of paramilitary police supported by armored car units and helicopters
swept into the tiny enclave of Donglü in Hebei Province and destroyed a Marian
shrine to which more than 100,000 underground Catholics had made pilgrimages
the previous year.

"The soldiers
destroyed the shrine, they confiscated the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
and they arrested two bishops," said Joseph Kung, president of the Kung
Foundation and a nephew of the cardinal.

Among those
arrested was Bishop Su Zhimin, of Baoding, who joins Bishop Thomas Zeng Jing-mu,
75, Bishop Joannes Han Dingxiang and the Rev. Charles Guo in jail or labor
camps.

The
Chinese authorities have tried to keep foreign journalists from covering the
current crackdown. A correspondent for The Washington Post was detained in 1995
for traveling to Donglü to witness an outdoor Mass for 10,000. He was later
released.

This month the local police briefly detained this correspondent
during a visit to Yujia, and confiscated all notes of interviews and a roll of
film.

The
crackdown on religion, particularly the underground Catholic Church, comes at a
time when Beijing is locked in a contest with Taiwan to win the Vatican's
diplomatic recognition.

Beijing's success
last year in persuading South Africa to drop its recognition of Taiwan has made
the Vatican prize all the more important in Beijing's campaign to isolate
Taiwan internationally.

Pope John Paul II
has said he would like to visit China, but a debate reportedly rages in the
Vatican between those who want the pope to stand firm until the repression ends
in China and those who believe he could make a more compelling case for the
plight of Catholics by making a visit.

As it stands,
perhaps a third of the "official" Catholic clergy in China have sought and
received papal acceptance.

John T. Kamm, an
American who has combined a business consultancy in China with human rights
advocacy, has warned the Chinese that reconciliation with the Vatican,
something Beijing is said to be keenly interested in, will be "very, very
difficult" if the "bishops and priests and laity of one community are
continually subjected to beatings, to arbitrary detention" and "if their places
of worship, their holy shrines are destroyed and their celebrations
banned."